Mandela in Verse: Myself I Stood in the Storm

On each day of Nelson Mandela’s eighteen years of confinement in Robben Island prison, he looked out onto the same barren world: low gray-brown walls; the prison yard where he and his fellow-detainees broke rocks, gray dust rising in gray puffs from his hammer. Beyond the prison walls, men labored in a limestone quarry. A scrubby beach led to the cold Atlantic, in which Mandela would stand, malnourished and tubercular, gathering seaweed that the prison officials sold for a profit. This is the desolation in which his heroism took root and flourished.

That word, “heroism,” like “leader” or “courage,” is inadequate. It breaks like rock in confrontation with the man himself. Some other language is needed to describe him, a hyper-language with which to eulogize him—in short, a poem.

Here is Osip Mandelstam’s “And I Was Alive”:

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,And it was all aimed at me …

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,All hover and hammer,Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.It is now. It is not.

This is Mandelstam’s last known poem, written in 1937, the year before his death, en route to the Siberian Gulag to which he had been sentenced by Stalin. Mandelstam was last seen picking through garbage for scraps of food, dressed far too lightly for the bitter winter. In the last months of his life, just before he was sent to that cold and brutal place, he wrote this joyful poem, this fierce song. How could a man in his circumstance have such awe for the life inside and around him? In the frozen world in which he was to die, how could he perceive so acutely this rupturing and rapturing, this hover and hammer?

It is unlikely, as I sit here at my desk, a mug of tea steaming, the radio playing softly, that I truly understand freedom, having always had it. Nor have I any real notion of confinement, never having been subject to it. And do I understand—do we understand—courage? What about conviction? What about greatness? Mandela left the world better than he found it not just because of what he did but because of what he wanted us to do. “Your freedom and mine cannot be separated,” he once said. His legacy is a reverberating call to action. But how, in the face of his near unfathomable commitment and steadfastness, are we to respond to his call, to summon some small version of his heroism within ourselves?

I wonder if Mandela, on his haunches in the prison yard on some terrible Robben Island afternoon, or knee deep in the stinging cold water, felt the sun on his face. I wonder if he might have experienced those seconds of warmth as Mandelstam did, as “unerring, self-shattering power”—as if the whole of the world were shouting, “You are alive! You are alive!” And what if the greatest heroism is in a moment in which the marvel of the world reveals itself in its most quotidian workings. This is no mere romantic notion: it is a vision, a burning bush, a call to battle. What if Mandela’s heroism began long before he faced down the racist and violent officers at Robben Island, before he led the A.N.C. to end the evil of apartheid, before he became the President of South Africa, before the Nobel—what if its origins are in his capacity to see the world at its most elemental and illuminated, to see leaf life and star shower as a promise, and himself and all of us as essential to its fulfillment?

Here are the opening lines of another poem, “Kitchenette Building,” by Gwendolyn Brooks: “But could a dream send up through onion fumes / Its white and violet… / Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms.” Brooks is asking if we could accept, even in the worst of circumstances, in privation and in lack, the majesty and power of the world as it is, and the potential for what it might become. She is asking if the world does arc toward betterment, toward beauty, toward justice. In short, she asks if we could be heroes. Yes, Mandela said. Yes, his every action told us; yes.

The agent’s dismissal gives the appearance that the agency buckled under political pressure, and sets a highly disturbing precedent.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.